The Crime of Sheila McGough

The Crime of Sheila McGough PDF Author: Janet Malcolm
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307830578
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 177

Get Book Here

Book Description
"[N]o other writer tells better stories about the perpetual, the unwinnable, battle between narrative and truth." --The New York Times Book Review The Crime of Sheila McGough is Janet Malcolm's brilliant exposé of miscarriage of justice in the case of Sheila McGough, a disbarred lawyer recently released from prison. McGough had served 2 1/2 years for collaborating with a client in his fraud, but insisted that she didn't commit any of the 14 felonies she was convicted. An astonishingly persuasive condemnation of the cupidity of American law and its preference for convincing narrative rather than the truth, this is also a story with an unconventional heroine. McGough is a zealous defense lawyer duped by a white-collar con man; a woman who lives, at the age of 54, with her parents; a journalistic subject who frustrates her interviewer with her maddening literal-mindedness. Spirited, illuminating, delightfully detailed, The Crime of Sheila McGough is both a dazzling work of journalism and a searching meditation on character and the law.

The Crime of Sheila McGough

The Crime of Sheila McGough PDF Author: Janet Malcolm
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307830578
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 177

Get Book Here

Book Description
"[N]o other writer tells better stories about the perpetual, the unwinnable, battle between narrative and truth." --The New York Times Book Review The Crime of Sheila McGough is Janet Malcolm's brilliant exposé of miscarriage of justice in the case of Sheila McGough, a disbarred lawyer recently released from prison. McGough had served 2 1/2 years for collaborating with a client in his fraud, but insisted that she didn't commit any of the 14 felonies she was convicted. An astonishingly persuasive condemnation of the cupidity of American law and its preference for convincing narrative rather than the truth, this is also a story with an unconventional heroine. McGough is a zealous defense lawyer duped by a white-collar con man; a woman who lives, at the age of 54, with her parents; a journalistic subject who frustrates her interviewer with her maddening literal-mindedness. Spirited, illuminating, delightfully detailed, The Crime of Sheila McGough is both a dazzling work of journalism and a searching meditation on character and the law.

The Journalist and the Murderer

The Journalist and the Murderer PDF Author: Janet Malcolm
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307797872
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 177

Get Book Here

Book Description
Named one of the 100 Best Nonfiction Books by The Modern Library and The Guardian • With surgical precision, Janet Malcolm dissects the famous case of journalist Joe McGinniss and murderer Jeffrey MacDonald. A riveting exploration of the uneasy dynamic between writers and their subjects and a must-read for anyone intrigued by journalism, the complexities of human nature, and true crime Malcolm deftly analyzes the real-life lawsuit of Jeffrey MacDonald, a convicted murderer, against Joe McGinniss, the author of Fatal Vision. At the heart of this masterfully crafted narrative is McGinniss's controversial portrayal of MacDonald, a former Green Beret convicted of murdering his pregnant wife and two young daughters. While writing the true crime book Fatal Vision, McGinniss ingratiated himself with MacDonald under the guise of supporting his innocence, only to portray him as guilty in the final publication. The resulting libel case put McGinniss's methods on trial, sparking a gripping examination of the ethics governing the writer-subject covenant. Through probing interviews with the key players - the principals, their lawyers, members of the jury, and expert witnesses - Malcolm provides an atmospheric retelling of the sensational trial. But her true subject is the treacherous territory writers must navigate when trying to objectively chronicle the lives of others. With piercing self-awareness, Malcolm examines her own role and motivations, laying bare the inherent conflicts and power dynamics that arise when a journalist pursues a story. Her candid, rueful reflections transform a seemingly straightforward work of reportage into a profound exploration of journalistic ethics and the limits of factual truth.

Reading Chekhov

Reading Chekhov PDF Author: Janet Malcolm
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0307431665
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 226

Get Book Here

Book Description
To illuminate the mysterious greatness of Anton Chekhov’s writings, Janet Malcolm takes on three roles: literary critic, biographer, and journalist. Her close readings of the stories and plays are interwoven with episodes from Chekhov’s life and framed by an account of Malcolm’s journey to St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Yalta. She writes of Chekhov’s childhood, his relationships, his travels, his early success, and his self-imposed “exile”—always with an eye to connecting them to themes and characters in his work. Lovers of Chekhov as well as those new to his work will be transfixed by Reading Chekhov.

Forty-one False Starts

Forty-one False Starts PDF Author: Janet Malcolm
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374709726
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 318

Get Book Here

Book Description
A National Book Critics Circle Finalist for Criticism A deeply Malcolmian volume on painters, photographers, writers, and critics. Janet Malcolm's In the Freud Archives and The Journalist and the Murderer, as well as her books about Sylvia Plath and Gertrude Stein, are canonical in the realm of nonfiction—as is the title essay of this collection, with its forty-one "false starts," or serial attempts to capture the essence of the painter David Salle, which becomes a dazzling portrait of an artist. Malcolm is "among the most intellectually provocative of authors," writes David Lehman in The Boston Globe, "able to turn epiphanies of perception into explosions of insight." Here, in Forty-one False Starts, Malcolm brings together essays published over the course of several decades (largely in The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books) that reflect her preoccupation with artists and their work. Her subjects are painters, photographers, writers, and critics. She explores Bloomsbury's obsessive desire to create things visual and literary; the "passionate collaborations" behind Edward Weston's nudes; and the character of the German art photographer Thomas Struth, who is "haunted by the Nazi past," yet whose photographs have "a lightness of spirit." In "The Woman Who Hated Women," Malcolm delves beneath the "onyx surface" of Edith Wharton's fiction, while in "Advanced Placement" she relishes the black comedy of the Gossip Girl novels of Cecily von Zeigesar. In "Salinger's Cigarettes," Malcolm writes that "the pettiness, vulgarity, banality, and vanity that few of us are free of, and thus can tolerate in others, are like ragweed for Salinger's helplessly uncontaminated heroes and heroines." "Over and over," as Ian Frazier writes in his introduction, "she has demonstrated that nonfiction—a book of reporting, an article in a magazine, something we see every day—can rise to the highest level of literature." One of Publishers Weekly's Best Nonfiction Books of 2013

Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis PDF Author: Janet Malcolm
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 030779783X
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 193

Get Book Here

Book Description
From the author of In the Freud Archives and The Journalist and the Murderer comes an intensive look at the practice of psychoanalysis through interviews with “Aaron Green,” a Freudian analyst in New York City. Malcolm is accessible and lucid in describing the history of psychoanalysis and its development in the United States. It provides rare insight into the contradictory world of psychoanalytic training and treatment and a foundation for our understanding of psychiatry and mental health. "Janet Malcom has managed somehow to peer into the reticent, reclusive world of psychoanalysis and to report to us, with remarkable fidelity, what she has seen. When I began reading I thought condescendingly, 'She will get the facts right, and everything else wrong.' She does get the facts right, but far more pressive, she has been able to capture and convey the claustral atmosphere of the profession. Her book is journalism become art." —Joseph Andelson, The New York Times Book Review

In the Freud Archives

In the Freud Archives PDF Author: Janet Malcolm
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 159017027X
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 181

Get Book Here

Book Description
Includes an afterword by the author In the Freud Archives tells the story of an unlikely encounter among three men: K. R. Eissler, the venerable doyen of psychoanalysis; Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, a flamboyant, restless forty-two-year-old Sanskrit scholar turned psychoanalyst turned virulent anti-Freudian; and Peter Swales, a mischievous thirty-five-year-old former assistant to the Rolling Stones and self-taught Freud scholar. At the center of their Oedipal drama are the Sigmund Freud Archives--founded, headed, and jealously guarded by Eissler--whose sealed treasure gleams and beckons to the community of Freud scholarship as if it were the Rhine gold. Janet Malcolm's fascinating book first appeared some twenty years ago, when it was immediately recognized as a rare and remarkable work of nonfiction. A story of infatuation and disappointment, betrayal and revenge, In the Freud Archives is essentially a comedy. But the powerful presence of Freud himself and the harsh bracing air of his ideas about unconscious life hover over the narrative and give it a tragic dimension.

The Purloined Clinic

The Purloined Clinic PDF Author: Janet Malcolm
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307830608
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 401

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Purloined Clinic is a retrospective of essays, reviews, and reports that reflect the range and depth of Janet Malcolm's engagement with psychology, criticism, art, and literature. She examines aspects of "that absurdist collaboration," the psychoanalytic dialogue, from which come "small, stray sell recognitions that no other human relationship yields, brought forward under conditions . . . that no other human relationship could survive." She addresses such subjects as Tom Wolfe's vendetta against modern architecture, Milan Kundera's literary experiments, and Vaclav Havel's prison letters. She explores the somewhat deflated world of post-revolutionary Prague, guides us through the labyrinthine New York art world of the eighties, and takes us behind the one-way mirror of Salvador Minuchin's school of family therapy. And to each subject she brings the incisive skepticism and dazzling epigrammatic style that are her hallmarks. “Why don’t more people write like [Malcolm]? . . . She is cast from the mold of the Eastern European intellectual: beholden to modernism. as familiar with Kundera’s exile as she is with Freud’s Vienna. This sensibility must grant her the detachment she sometimes so mercilessly employs, but it also gives her an unassailable passion for getting to the center of things.” —Boston Globe

Iphigenia in Forest Hills

Iphigenia in Forest Hills PDF Author: Janet Malcolm
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300168837
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
Malcolm's riveting new book tells the story of a murder trial in the insular Bukharan-Jewish community of Forest Hills, Queens, that captured national attention.

A Wilderness of Error

A Wilderness of Error PDF Author: Errol Morris
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143123696
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 575

Get Book Here

Book Description
Soon to be an FX Docuseries from Emmy® Award-Winning Producer Marc Smerling (The Jinx) featuring the author Errol Morris! Academy Award–winning filmmaker Errol Morris examines one of the most notorious and mysterious murder trials of the twentieth century In this profoundly original meditation on truth and the justice system, Errol Morris—a former private detective and director of The Thin Blue Line—delves deeply into the infamous Jeffrey MacDonald murder case. MacDonald, whose pregnant wife and two young daughters were brutally murdered in 1970, was convicted of the killings in 1979 and remains in prison today. The culmination of an investigation spanning over twenty years and a masterly reinvention of the true-crime thriller, A Wilderness of Error is a shocking book because it shows that everything we have been told about the case is deeply unreliable and that crucial elements of case against MacDonald are simply not true.

On the Yard

On the Yard PDF Author: Malcolm Braly
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590176103
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 354

Get Book Here

Book Description
A major American novel, and arguably the finest work of literature ever to emerge from a US prison, On the Yard is a book of penetrating psychological realism in which Malcolm Braly paints an unforgettable picture of the complex and frightening world of the penitentiary. At its center are the violently intertwined stories of Chilly Willy, in trouble with the law from his earliest years and now the head of the prison’s flourishing black market in drugs and sex, and of Paul, wracked with guilt for the murder of his wife and desperate for some kind of redemption. At once brutal and tender, clear-eyed and rueful, On the Yard presents the penitentiary not as an exotic location, an exception to everyday reality, but as an ordinary place, one every reader will recognize, American to the core.